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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).

date: 13 December 2017

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter surveys methods of analysing phonological change that rely on computers because they require lengthy operations, mathematical precision, and reproducibility. Applications include techniques for discovering and verifying sound correspondences, modelling the course of sound change, computing the most likely genetic tree consistent with a set of innovations, testing the significance of the phonetic evidence for genetic relationship between languages, and exploring the relationships between dialects via quantification of phonetic and phonological differences.

Brett Kessler is an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches in the Linguistics Program and the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program. He works on developing computational techniques for studying language phylogenetics and the psychology of phonemic writing systems, with emphasis on statistical methods for hypothesis testing in linguistics.

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).